Interesting results @ phase 3. Even bigger fat loss despite switching to a "normal diet" and limited activity. It was specified what exactly this normal diet and activity comprised? Even if 50% deficit or close to maintenance.... this implies some kind of inertial/momentum effect (that is, they continued to lose fat even faster despite pulling the brakes on the calorie deficit during those 3 days...).

They used DEXA so fat loss measurement should be accurate enough.

I'm reading this correctly? And if so.... WTH lol I wasn't aware of such phenomena.

In the past when I was kind of obsessed with reaching the biggest deficit possible, I'd setup my cellphone alarm app to fire up every 1h and would run 20 minutes on the treadmill at 5.5mph (enough to burn 200+kcal) this was repeated for 10 times to get 2000kcal expenditure with exercise. Diet would be only 500kcal and total deficit close to 4k that day.
This was done mostly at mondays after a sunday refeed/binge to quick start the diet. My daily deficit goal back then was generally 2000kcal/day (1k feed, 1k exercice) on weekdays only, while weekend would be off. I could sustain that consistently for few weeks and got great results while things didn't degenerated.... (many lessons learned since then....)

So it's not the same as this experiment (5k deficit daily for 4 days lol, that's truly epic). Still good to know that this kind of effort is not a waste and LBM losses is not abysmal as I imagined.

I'm more interested in the anecdote about the person who had some kind of workstation cycle and did very low-intensity cardio all day. When you said "keeping calories stable" do you remember if that still meant a deficit (just not necessarily a severe one)? If they were eating at/above maintenance and still losing fat it sounds like this could be kind of a "throw money at the problem" solution to calorie partitioning.

I've studied the guy Lyle's talking about: his name was Jolio. He was extreme in cardio and in his diet. He went through periods of consuming only whey and fish oil because whey was the most cost efficient way to get his protein even though he admitted it wasn't very satiating.

The one link I have saved on this phone shows him taking inn 330g protein from whey at 225lb body weight and doing 4-8 hrs of LISS. Later in the log he took in less protein per LBM. I don't have the exact numbers. He also did HEAVY weights. From the comments others made, his lifts were strong as many were impressed by his poundage. He maintained his strength through his crazy program and has been sort of an idol of mine as I've tried to follow.his extreme cardio approach to.cutting at various times in the last two years.

Interesting results @ phase 3. Even bigger fat loss despite switching to a "normal diet" and limited activity. It was specified what exactly this normal diet and activity comprised? Even if 50% deficit or close to maintenance.... this implies some kind of inertial/momentum effect (that is, they continued to lose fat even faster despite pulling the brakes on the calorie deficit during those 3 days...).

I didn't got into a lot of details in the writeup but basically they were food tracked for a week before the intervention to establish 'maintenance' calories nad put back on that in Phase 3. The study suggested that this might still have been a deficit due to food under-reporting initially. Which is probably true.

I didn't got into a lot of details in the writeup but basically they were food tracked for a week before the intervention to establish 'maintenance' calories nad put back on that in Phase 3. The study suggested that this might still have been a deficit due to food under-reporting initially. Which is probably true.

Is it possible that it was the result of some of the waste mass still being excreted from the body (following the oxidation of fatty acids during Phase 2)?

Edit: to clarify, by waste mass I mean whatever remains of fat tissue after fatty acid is used, like carbon, oxygen or whatever. ??

Many things are possible which is why I said the researchers 'suggested...'. They didn't measure such and all they could do was speculate.

Ah so the researchers noticed that too. I would be surprised if they didn't since it's glaring.

Probably this was caused by few different factors including maybe measurement margin of error, the partial glycogen depletion causing calories to be initially stored while fat burn kept going-on, among other possibilities.

It's also glaring that the protein consumed didn't get any LBM sparing compared with zero protein but this has more to do with the type of protein used (whey) as observed in the article.

I would read the entire paper but only the abstract is available. Anyway the main point covered by all that was really interesting.